2015

An exploded power plant, collapsed buildings after an earthquake, a burning vehicle loaded with hazardous goods – all of these are dangerous situations for human emergency responders. What if we could send robots instead of humans? Researchers at the Autonomous Motion Department work on fundamental principles required to build intelligent robots which one day can help us in dangerous situations. A key requirement for making this happen is that robots must be enabled to learn.

2015

Tiny self-propelled motors which speed through the water and clean up pollutions along the way or small robots which can swim effortlessly through blood to one day transport medication to a certain part of the body – this sounds like taken from a science fiction movie script. However, Samuel Sánchez is already hard at work in his lab at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart to make these visions come true.
Self-propelled micro-nanorobots and the usage as integrated sensors in microfluid-chips: that’s the topic of Sánchez` research group.

2012

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide a new means of communication that does not rely on volitional muscle control. This may provide the capability to locked-in patients, e.g., those suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to maintain interactions with their environment. Besides providing communication capabilities to locked-in patients, BCIs may further prove to have a beneficial impact on stroke rehabilitation. In this article, the state-of-the-art of BCIs is reviewed and current research questions are discussed.

There have been numerous speculations in scientific publications and the popular media about wirelessly controlled microrobots (microbots) navigating the human body. Such micro-agents could revolutionize minimally invasive medical procedures. Using physical vapor deposition we grow billions of micron-sized colloidal screw-propellers on a wafer. These chiral mesoscopic screws can be magnetized and moved through solution under computer control. The screw-propellers resemble artificial flagella and are the only ‘microbots’ to date that can be fully controlled in solution at micron length scales.

Metals may help to convert semiconductors from a disordered (amorphous) to an ordered (crystalline) form at low temperatures. A general, quantitative model description has been developed on the basis of interface thermodynamics, which provides fundamental understanding of such so-called metal-induced crystallization (MIC) of amorphous semiconductors. This fundamental understanding can allow the low-temperature (< 200 ºC) manufacturing of high-efficiency solar cells and crystalline-Si-based nanostructures on cheap and flexible substrates such as glasses, plastics and possibly even papers.

Many biological cells endow themselves with a sugar-rich coat that plays a key role in the protection of the cell and in structuring and communicating with its environment. An outstanding property of these pericellular coats is their dynamic self-organization into strongly hydrated and gel-like meshworks. Tailor-made model systems that are constructed from the molecular building blocks of pericellular coats can help to understand how the coats function.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems